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The Real Mother of All Bombs, 46 Years Ago
vaporland writes "Tsar Bomba is the Western name for the RDS-220, the largest, most powerful weapon ever detonated. The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, in an archipelago in the Arctic Sea. Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb had a yield of about 50 megatons. Its detonation released energy equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun for 39 nanoseconds of its detonation. The device was scaled down from its original design of 100 megatons to reduce the resulting nuclear fallout. The Tsar Bomba qualifies as the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity."
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Vista's still a bigger bomb.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Yes, but you can transport them on a large nuclear submarine and quietly lay them down by your enemies coastlines. Say 20 of these 100Mt bad boys and you got yourself a nice man made tsunami. No need to fly around or expose the launch...
Streaming flash video of detonation:
http://sonicbomb.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=90
Tough one. The sun is certainly a nuclear reactor. Is the defining property of a device that it was created by someone? I guess this is an intelligent design issue. ;)
Penis mightier.
they are always labeled a "test". what exactly were they testing?
..or they they could go one step further in a foolish session of bloody pointless political brinkmanship?
that they can make a bloody big bang?
what the after effect were?
I always thought with nuclear weapons, that really after a certain size there were precious little point is making it more powerful.
Sure it is. "A device whereby hydrogen is converted through fusion reactions to helium for the purpose of releasing energy." Didn't you read IBM's patent application?
It was a show. One could say one of the most spectacular special effects ever made.
That baby weighed about 30 tons. The Tupulev that carried it to its destination had its bomb bays open and some fuel tanks removed to fit that thing somehow into its belly. Though it could be carried anywhere within Russia, an intercontinental strike with it was impossible.
No, ICBMs couldn't carry it either. By far not. The R9, which just came into production in 61, could carry less than 2 tons.
The idea behind the Tsar (besides proving who has the biggest) was to compensate for inaccurate targeting. The goal was a bomb that could level a town even if dropped miles away (because the bomber was about to be shot down, or because the pilot had better things to do, like avoiding being shot down, than aiming accurately). It was quickly abandoned when ICBM targeting became accurate enough to ensure you could level whatever target you want to strike. And MIRVs offer much more destruction per ton carried.
In its core, it was a propaganda stunt. Another chapter in the dick-comparing story between Russia and the USA.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Given the history of Soviet nuclear testing (or perfection), I am happy that they managed to find a remote spot and not blow up their own like they did in Kazakhstan. Also, I am thankful that this "my penis is bigger than yours" race is over. Things could have been a lot worse.
The key difference is the incredibly short time frame the bomb produces 1% of the energy of the Sun. This is helped by the Sun releasing energy in essentially the slowest possible way. (The sun is self limited, in that when it gets too hot from too much fusion occurring it expands slightly, lowering the rate of fusion until it cools down.) I don't find it odd at all that for a short period of time the largest fusion bomb ever tested produced 1% of the sun's energy. I can produce accelerations in the hundreds of G's simply by smashing my fist into a wall and likewise say that "for less than a millisecond I produced forces hundreds of times stronger than the pull of Earth's gravity" and be technically correct.
Trinity and Beyond along with the Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes are a very good primer on the Anglo-American development along with the science and math done in Europe and the Americas from 1900-1945.
If you are interested in the spying and hydrogen bomb development along with the Soviet bomb, Rhodes Black Sun covers that.
Actually we don't even use bombs that size because it's just expensive overkill, doing more damage to the atmosphere and planet than to the target you were aiming at. It's more effective to use a missile with a crapload of small warheads that can be targetted individually so you know you hit what you were aiming for and aren't restricted to placing a circle of damage in one point that has to contain all targets. Also as crappy as modern anti-ICBM weapons are, they're still more likely to take down a single, huge warhead than a swarm of tiny ones, probably with decoys scattered in.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Because the statement that it would be equivalent to "The power output of the Sun for .39 nanoseconds" is misleading.
Don't get distracted by the 39ns figure. Power is an instantaneous quantity - it is a rate at which energy is transmitted. They are saying that the bomb sustained a level of power (rate of energy) output and held it there for a period of time - 39 ns - that approached 1% of the sun.
I repeat: 39ns is just the period of time that the power level peaked for. They calculated that the amplitude of the power peak itself, was equivalent to 1% the power output of the sun.
We don't care about how long the peak lasted for, the 39ns, unless you start integrating power over time as you just did, in which case you're comparing a quantity of energy, rather than a rate of energy output. Yes, I suppose you could say that 39ns @ 1% sun power is equivalent to an amount of energy produced by the sun in 0.39ns, but that's not the interesting number here, because we could similarly integrate just about any huge power source over a long enough interval of time (hours, days, years, whatever) to come up with "the same amount of energy output by the sun over 39 ns".
So the interesting number is in this case, yes, that the actual instantaneous absolute power output of the bomb approached 1% of that of the sun, albeit for only 39 ns.
Quite remarkable...
set up us the Tsara Bomba!
Monstar L
My sense of scale must be off; I would've thought 1% of the Sun's power could instantly reduce the Earth to a barren rock. Surely the Sun is well over 100 times larger than the Earth?
Don't try this at home, kids..
As is my age, however I celebrate birthdays once annually. Have a look at the date the thing was detonated.
/. might actually have repeat articles in another year.
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear big-effing-stupid-violent-explody-thingy. Happy birthday to you!
And I suspect Digg and
Given the fact the explosion created power for such a short amount of time it is not inconceivable that its power output was approaching 1% of the sun. It would not be able to sustain that power, and given it was a fission reaction which for each reaction releases ~ 200MeV of energy, compared to ~ 13MeV for a fusion reaction, you can create a lot more energy (usually in the form of heat) from a short term fission than you can fusion.
Also as many others are stating, you're probably confusing power with energy, the energy output won't be 1% of the sun, but the power output for that short time could well approach it.
Really and honestly, what purpose can a 50-megatonne thermonuclear bomb really serve, except to say, "My power to vaporise millions of innocent people is greater than your power..."? While perhaps impressive from a scientific point of view, there is no practical use for nukes other than to annihilate civilization as we know it.
Yes, leave it to the governments of the world to protect us and keep us "safe". "Safe" as in safely glowing in your grave.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
From qalculate:
sigma*(5778K)^4*4*pi*(1.392E9m)^2*29ns*1% to J
= 446.3 PJ
ans/c^2
= 4.966 kg
Conclusion: maybe, maybe not.
You "just" need to convert 4.966kg in pure energy in 29ns!
But war doesn't have to make sense and it doesn't have to be green. Bombs can also be remotely detonated. World War IV will be fought with sticks and stone buddy.
Why is laying nuclear mines a suicide mission? Just a question of a long enough time-delay, surely? You'd only need one sub, working its way along the coast. And as for avoiding detection, Boomers have gotten rather good at that over the last 50 years.
This is the Secret Service. Your location has been mapped and the new AG has been informed to issue a warantless tap on yourself, landline, mobile, home, work.
Meanwhile Gitmo has a warm seat being prepared for your arrival.
The dogs there have not been biting anyone ever since the congress started questioning the poor canines.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
If the population know they're going to be vaporised when the government goes to war, they'll become far more concerned with the politicians preponderance for going to war in the first place.
Deleted
Bravo, AC, Bravo. I was going to say much the same thing, albeit maybe less bluntly. However, I would add this to the above:
Everyone I have heard espouse the "loving Earth/Gaia" bit lives a comfortable, relatively modern life. Mother Earth loves you plenty when you have electricity, running water and stores full of food.
Take that away and get real close to Mother Earth. I've been there: Mother Earth may still love you, but the bitch will try her best to kill you at every opportunity.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
- Kiss Your Sorry Ass Goodbye! The Atom Bomb Is Gonna Fly.
- Doomsday - while just a rough draft, what's there will give you nightmares. I had to stop working on it because it made me paranoid.
- Constitutional Crisis In A Nuclear State. Happily the crisis was resolved amicably, but potential trouble is still brewing
Yeah, I was pretty surprised the domain was available too.I plan to add some stuff about the Cuban Missile Crisis sometime soon, such as a wild bear wandering onto a US Air Force Base with the result that a fighter squadron armed with - ready for it? - nuclear air-to-air missiles was scrambled, and would have taken off had not the base commander blocked the runway with his own car.
The idea behind what one pilot described as "the dumbest weapon ever invented" was to fire a rocket armed with a nuclear bomb into the general vicinity of a soviet bomber. The blast would be big enough that the bomber would be destroyed even if the rocket didn't get very close. It's not quite clear what would become of the American or Canadian citizens on the ground beneath the detonation.
There's lots more, but I have to do it in little pieces or the I start wanting to crawl out of my own skin.
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But I was wrong.
I don't recall now who invented it, but the idea was to surround a large hydrogen bomb was a casing of non-radioactive Cobalt. The fusion reaction produces a neutron or so for each helium atom created. In a conventional hydrogen bomb, these neutrons are used directly to cause damage, by irradiating living things. But in a Cobalt bomb...
The neutrons are absorbed by the Cobalt, to become the highly radioactive gamma ray emmitter Cobalt-60. It gets vaporized by the blast, and largely blown into the upper atmosphere.
Most radioactive fallout from an H-bomb has a very short half life, which is why those who escape the blast can safely emerge from their fallout shelters in a couple weeks. Not so with Cobalt-60: it has a half-life of several years.
That's long enough to enable to vaporized Cobalt-60 to spread via air currents all over the Earth, eventually to be caught up in raindrops and thereby fallen to the Earth.
Where it will irradiate everyone with a lethal gamma dose.
It was envisioned as a spoiler, to be detonated by the loser in a nuclear war. It would need to be a pretty big bomb, on the scale of Tsar Bomba, but it wouldn't need to be delivered, just detonated in place. It will kill everyone eventually, except maybe those in deep underground shelters, who manage to stay there for decades.
It's inventions like this by my colleagues that make me ashamed to have a degree in Physics.
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Firewalkers don't burn their feet because they are in contact with the heat for only a short period of time. This bomb didn't do apocalyptic damage because it only lasted for a brief amount of time. If the explosion held its peak for a minute, there would likely be issues produced that alter life as we know it, but it was a short enough burst that the energy was able to dissipate over a large area without issue.
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And that's not at all far-fetched; I read once that a certain Washington DC Domino's Pizza knew the night before when the first Persian Gulf War was going to start, as they were getting orders from the Pentagon all night long.
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You are exactly correct. This is why the most fearsome weapon ever built was not the "Tsar Bomba," but rather the Peacekeeper/MX ICBM. The Peacekeeper could physically hold up to 12 300kt warheads (limited by treaty to 10), each independently targetable.
Nukes kill with three types of damage: thermal, blast, and ionizing radiation. These three different effects scale differently, as you can read here.
Since the amount of blast-based destruction goes down rapidly the farther from "ground zero" you go (inverse-cube law), it makes sense that a big-ass fucking bomb like the "Tsar Bomba" doesn't get you very far. However, in the picture depicted here you can see how modern weapon desigs get around this - each streak is a dummy reentry vehicle from a single Peacekeeper/MX test launch; which if it were not a launch vehicle test would have a mushroom cloud underneath, each with 20x the power of the Hiroshima blast.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And as for avoiding detection, Boomers have gotten rather good at that over the last 50 years.
But the sounds of The Big Chill soundtrack always give them away in the end.
Its detonation released energy equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun for 39 nanoseconds of its detonation.
The thing that irks me the most about Slashdot is the way that the majority of posters and commenters so maladroitly feign expertise in the sciences. Anyway, you meant to say "Tsar Bomba's rate of energy release, for a period of 39 nanoseconds, was ~1% of the Sun's rate of luminous energy release (which has been maintained continuously for ~4.5 billion years.)"